And while Trump has taken steps to accomplish some of these goals — mostly via executive action —
it’s too early to determine how successful he will be in pushing his
agenda through. But, most voters say he’s delivering so far....

When a similar question was asked in the third year of Mr. Clinton’s
first term, 45% said news coverage of the president was fairly well
balanced, while about one-third said it was biased against Mr. Clinton
and 16% said it was biased in his favor.

The
Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll was based on nationwide telephone
interviews of 1,000 adults conducted from Feb. 18-22. Overall, the
data’s margin of error is plus or minus 3.1 percentage points. The
margin of error for subgroups is larger."

The White House doesn't need its traditional supporters anymore, because
its problems are way beyond being solved by the base. And the people in
the administration don't even much like the base. Desperate straits
have left them liberated, andthey are acting out their disdain. Leading
Democrats often think their base is slightly mad but at least their
heart is in the right place. This White House thinks its base is stupidand that its heart is in the wrong place.

The president has taken to suggesting that opponents of his
immigration bill are are unpatriotic -- they "don't want to do what's right
for America." His ally Sen. Lindsey Graham has said,"We're gonna tell
the bigots to shut up." On Fox last weekend he vowed to "push back."

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff suggested opponents
wouldprefer illegal immigrants be killed; Commerce Secretary Carlos
Gutierrez said those who oppose the bill want "mass deportation." Former
Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson said those who oppose the bill are
"anti-immigrant" and suggested they suffer from "rage"and"national
chauvinism."

Why would they speak so insultingly, with such hostility, of
opponents who are concerned citizens? And often, though not exclusively,
concerned conservatives? It is odd, but it is of a piece with, or a
variation on, the "Too bad" governing style. And it is one that has,day
by dayfor at least the past three years, been tearing apart the
conservative movement.... The beginning of my own sense of separation from the Bush
administration came in January 2005, when the president declared that it
is now the policy of the United States to eradicate tyranny in the
world, and that the survival of American liberty is dependent on the
liberty of every other nation. This was at once so utopian and so
aggressive that it shocked me. For others the beginning of distance
might have been Katrina and the incompetence it revealed, or the depth
of the mishandling and misjudgments of Iraq....

One of the things I have come to think the past few years is thatthe
Bushes, father and son,though different in many ways, are great
wasters of political inheritance.

They throw it away as if they'd earned it and could do with it what
they liked.Bush senior inherited a vibrant country and a party at peace
with itself. He won the leadership of a party that had finally,at
great cost, by 1980, fought itself through to unity and come together on
shared principles.Mr. Bush won in 1988 by saying he would govern as
Reagan had. Yet he did not understand he'd been elected to Reagan's
third term. He thought he'd been elected because they liked him.And so
he raised taxes, sundered a hard-won coalition, and found himself
shocked to lose the presidency, and for eight long and consequential
years. He had many virtues, but he wasted his inheritance.

Bush the younger came forward, presented himself as a conservative,
garnered all the frustrated hopes of his party, turned them into
victory, and not nine months later was handed a historical trauma that
left his country rallied around him, lifting him, and his party bonded
to him. He was disciplined and often daring, but in time he sundered the
party that rallied to him, and broke his coalition into pieces.He
threw away his inheritance. I do not understand such squandering.Now conservatives and Republicans are going to have to win back their party. They are going to have to break from those who have already
broken from them. This will require courage, serious thinking and an
ability to do what psychologists used to call letting go. This will be
painful, but it's time. It's more than time."

The change-the-subject stunt annoyed some in the Ellison camp. As
Mary Kay Linge and Aaron Short reported in Sunday’s Post, one Democratic
source said Ellison allies had asked de Blasio not to come: “The buzz
is, what the f–k was he doing here?”

After all, the mayor has built a rep not so much as a progressive
leader but as a progressive opportunist. During the long Bernie
Sanders-Hillary Clinton contest for the 2016 presidential nomination, he
first tried (and failed) to play power broker, as with his unsuccessful
efforts to make both candidates attend his own issues forum.

Perhaps de Blasio was looking to reconnect with the Bernie bros by
going all-in for Ellison: Sanders and American Federation of Teachers
chief Randi Weingarten were the two main speakers when Ellison announced
for the job.

In the end, though, former Labor Secretary Tom Perez — the preferred candidate of former President Barack Obama — won.

6 of 10, "Karl Rove": The main attraction of course is DJ Jazzy Rover here. At the 2007
Radio and Television Correspondents' Dinner, the Architect himself
revealed his most frightening persona — MC Rove. Which is really the
laziest hip-hop name he could have come up with. Ol' Dirty Rove? Rove
Dogg? Ice-K? We're not even trying here. Also, he apparently believes
that rapping can only occur with a deep, faux-gravelly voice.
Shockingly embarrassing, no matter your politics."...

That caused rates for
super-catastrophe insurance to fall, leading Berkshire to back away from
the products, according to Buffett. Costlier and more frequent
"super-cats" would actually likely benefit Berkshire's insurance
business, he wrote.

At the time the letter was
released, Buffett was facing a proposal from a shareholder that asked
Berkshire to report on the dangers climate change poses to the company's
insurance operations.

Research shows it is premature to conclude
greenhouse gas emissions from human activities "have already had a
detectable impact on Atlantic hurricane or global tropical cyclone
activity," according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration."...

For three years,
violent militants have run Aleppo. Their rule began with a wave of
repression. They posted notices warning residents:

“Don’t send your
children to school. If you do, we will get the backpack and you will get
the coffin.” Then they destroyed factories, hoping that unemployed
workers would have no recourse other than to become fighters. They
trucked looted machinery to Turkey and sold it.

This is convoluted
nonsense, but Americans cannot be blamed for believing it. We have
almost no real information about the combatants, their goals, or their
tactics. Much blame for this lies with our media.

Inevitably, this
kind of disinformation has bled into the American presidential campaign.
At the recentdebate in Milwaukee, Hillary Clinton claimed that United
Nations peace efforts in Syria were based on “an agreement I negotiated
in June of 2012 in Geneva.”

The precise opposite is true.In 2012
Secretary of State Clintonjoined Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Israel in a
successful effort to kill Kofi Annan’s UN peace plan because it would
have accommodated Iran and kept Assad in power, at least temporarily. No
one on the Milwaukee stage knew enough to challenge her.